Dread on Arrival Read Online Free PDF

along in the Roadshow ’s wake, picking up all the junk the Roadshow didn’t want to feature. Did you see that episode where Edmund Tree announced he was coming to Hemlock Falls? Did you see that pissed off little old lady whack him over the …”
    A crash from the vicinity of the conference room made them both jump.
    “I don’t watch it.”
    “Even if it is a riot over old junk, you still don’t want to go in there. I mean, Mrs. Henry stomped right in after Marge Schmidt came out here the second time looking for you and called Marge an old boot.”
    “Adela called Marge an old boot?” Quill discovered most of her hair had fallen out of her topknot. She swept it up again and pinned it firmly in place. Adela, Elmer Henry’s imperious wife, was the real power behind the mayor’s throne and a stickler for what she called ladylike manners and grace under pressure. “No! You must have misheard her.”
    “She did. And you know Mrs. Henry. She’s about the most unflapped person in Hemlock Falls. But there she was, hollering away and red in the face.”
    “My goodness,” Quill said, equably.
    “If you ask me,” Dina said unhappily, “we’re on the verge of revolution, right here in the village. Who would have thought something like that could happen here, of all places?”
    Quill smiled at her. Years of happy attention to the pond life of upstate New York clearly hadn’t prepared Dina for the messiness of human behavior. “You remember the second rule of innkeeping.”
    “‘Keep your shirt on’?” Dina shook her head. “You go on in there. You’ll see.”
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    ∼Hemlock Falls Ladies’∼
Auxiliary Coffee Cake
     
    2 large eggs1 cup salted butter1¼ cups sugar2 cups flour½ teaspoon baking soda1½ teaspoons baking powder1 cup sour cream1 teaspoon vanilla¾ cup ground pecans combined with 3 tablespoons brown sugarCombine eggs, butter, and sugar. Add flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix well. Fold in sour cream and vanilla. Put half of batter into a Bundt pan. Sprinkle one half of the pecan sugar mixture over it. Add second half of batter and sprinkle remainder of sugar over the top. Bake in a cold oven set to 350 degrees for about an hour.The conference room was at the end of a short flagstone hall. Quill paused before going in and put her ear to the door. It was ominously quiet.
    She rapped twice, out of habit, and turned the knob and went in.
    The room was long and narrow, with a low ceiling. Two hundred years before, it had been a keeping room, storing fruits, vegetables, cured hams, and barrels of flour and sugar. Quill had taken a utilitarian approach to the space. A credenza set up for coffee service was on the long wall facing the door. The floor was brick, impossible to keep warm in the winter, and it was with real reluctance that she’d installed Berber carpeting. She’d placed a series of whiteboards on the walls, and installed a conference table that seated twenty-four.
    Twenty of the twenty-four spaces were filled with members of the Hemlock Falls Chamber of Commerce. They were all silent, with the kind of uncomfortable body posture that nice, middle-class Americans adopt when embarrassed. Elmer Henry sat at the head of the table, a mulish expression on his face. His majestic wife Adela, sat next to him, dressed in a bright orange pant suit and a ruffled navy blouse. Her face was red. Howie Murchison, the town justice and senior partner in Hemlock Falls’s only law firm, sat next to Adela. Howie was in his early sixties, with a fringe of graying hair and a comfortable paunch. He raised both eyebrows in greeting as Quill walked in.
    “There you are, Quill. We’ve had a motion to form a new political party sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. We need your vote to break the tie.”
    This was so completely unexpected that Quill turned around to make sure she had come in the right door. Then, “A what?”
    “You heard Howie,” Marge Schmidt said. “Siddown and vote.”
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